Past events

Tuesday, January 8, 2019

We are not in control of social networks, but we use them for most of our
interactions online. They get to decide how our content is shown, may not
provide us programmatic access to it, and try to run annoying adverts around it
(if they bother to create a “business plan”), then shut down in a couple of
years and your content is gone.

It can be difficult to decide to put content on websites we own because there
isn’t a ready made group of people to connect and share it with. By using
standards from the IndieWeb we can connect our personal sites with others to get
the benefits of a social network while owning our content.

In this talk, you’ll see how we can authenticate ourselves, share posts, reply
to and like content, and combine our personal sites with our existing social
network profiles.

Joshua Hawxwell

Josh is an eccentric developer living in Nottingham with a background in mathematics and computing. He has a keen interest in many languages including JavaScript, Go, Elm and Ruby, but prefers to kick back with .NET in his day job.

Josh can usually be found creating small apps and tools for various personal interests such as media controls and photography - he never fails to surprise his followers on Flickr.

David Wood

Tuesday, October 9, 2018

The average website page weight is 50% images and 25% video. As the images and
videos delivered to mobile devices get larger and larger, the load time of
websites gets slower and slower. Further complicating matters, there are
thousands of screens and devices with varying resolutions and CPU power that
receive this content.

In this talk, we’ll examine strategies to send the perfect image or video to
every device, ensuring a fast, beautiful rendering of your content. We’ll look
at how to test our content, and describe responsive images, delivering
progressive images, and finally optimizing all of this content for fast delivery
to each screen.

Attendees will walk away with a better understanding of how to efficiently
deliver beautiful images to every device that accesses their content.

Doug Sillars

Doug is is a freelance mobile performance expert, having helped thousands of developers speed up their mobile apps and websites.

Tuesday, September 11, 2018

The advance of machine learning and artificial intelligence is reviving interest
in conversational interfaces. This creates the potential for conversation as
the new mode of interaction with technology.

The big problem is recognizing spoken input has been mostly solved, but a new
challenge has arisen: how to build a user experience that’s modelled after
natural human conversation.

This talk outlines the basic mechanics of conversation, introduces core
principles to design by, and presents you with a practical UI to start creating
conversational experiences that engage, delight, and truly help your users.
We’ll also be building a voice enabled bot using JavaScript!

Alex Lakatos

In his spare time he volunteers at Mozilla as a Tech Speaker and a Reps
Mentor.

JavaScript developer building on the open web, he has been pushing its
boundaries every day. You can check out his github profile or get in touch on
twitter. When he’s not programming in London, he likes to travel the world,
so it’s likely you’ll bump into him in an airport lounge.

David Wood

Tuesday, June 12, 2018

This month’s speaker is Rob from
opendataservices.coop, a tech cooperative which
helps people and organisations publish and use open data in a variety of fields
from international development, government procurement, to philanthropy.

The goal is to help organisations have an impact on the world - to make taxes go
further, to stop corruption, increase the effectiveness of aid, and to help make
sure that charity money goes where it’s needed most.

Underpinning all of this JSON Schema (and some XML Schema, if you dig around the
back of the closet).

In this talk we’ll hear from Rob about how cooperatives are awesome, what open
data is, and why it’s such a good thing. We will see some examples of where
standardised open data has improved lives, and learn about the open data of
Nottingham.

Rob Redpath

Rob is passionate about open data and how the world can benefit from sharing more.

Tuesday, March 13, 2018

…it would be nice to have one who questioned their own thoughts
- Joshua Hawxwell

This month we are proud to present Josh Hawxwell with a talk on something he is
very passionate about: functional programming!

We’ll take a look at some of the many things that the term “functional
programming” can mean, and to what degree that applies to JavaScript. Then we’ll
look at how these ideas (which are present in Elm) allow us to easily write safe
front-end applications, with comparisons to other frameworks and packages such
as React and Redux.

After the talk we’ll have a workshop session where attendees will be divided
into two groups of AngularJS and React, and discuss the positives and negatives
between re-implementations of a simple Elm app in either framework.

We hope to see you there!

Joshua Hawxwell

Josh is an eccentric developer living in Nottingham with a background in
mathematics and computing. He has a keen interest in many languages including
Go, Elm and Ruby, but prefers to kick back with .NET in his day job.

Josh can usually be found creating small apps and tools for various personal
interests such as media controls and photography - he never fails to surprise
his followers on Flickr.

Tuesday, February 13, 2018

Join us for an action packed month as we feature a talk on Umbraco CMS,
a Lean Coffee, and we see 2018’s first edition of the Cool
Wall!

We will hear from Paul about how to build websites on the Umbraco framework in
headless mode. Paul’s a great speaker with extensive experience of content
management systems and Umbraco. Through this talk, you can expect to take away
the skills and knowledge to get to grips quickly with Umbraco’s headless mode in
a familiar React setting.

We’ll also present an interactive Lean Coffee session where we aim to find out
which technologies, speakers and workshops YOU would like to see at
NottsJS in 2018.

The ever-popular Cool Wall will see a return for 2018, where we will get the
chance to rate the current tech offerings in the form of pseudo-representative
fashion labels related to unspecified yet approximate temperature guides -
“coolness”.

See you there!

Paul Seal

Paul is a .NET Web Developer from Derby, specialising in building Content
Management System (CMS) websites using MVC with Umbraco as a framework. Paul
is passionate about web development and programming as a whole, apart from
when he’s with his wife and son; if he’s not writing code, he’s thinking about
it or listening to a podcast about it.

Tuesday, November 14, 2017

Due to unforeseeable problems, we have had to cancel the Amazon Alexa talk by
David Low, and are replacing it with another talk about Node JS in the Cloud.
We are looking to reschedule the Amazon Alexa talk for January.

During this session we will aim to build a server-less RESTful API based upon
Amazon’s AWS cloud technologies.

This is intended as a high-level hands-on session, where you can get exposure to
a wide number of intersecting technologies, giving us the opportunity to do a
deep dive on each individual component in future sessions.

These will be included into a Blue Peter style “here’s one I made earlier” React
Website to show off the capabilities.

If you are planning on joining in then please register for an Amazon AWS
account BEFORE the event. Amazon
offer a 12 month free tier which will cover your needs, but you will need to
supply payment details.

Chris Kemp

Chris is one of the Organisers at NottsJS with many years of experience in IT
across a large number of sectors. He currently works as a Software Contractor
developing software for Fire & Rescue Services.

Tuesday, October 10, 2017

Many of us know about the benefits of offloading concurrent I/O operations
through the use of callbacks, libraries such as async and bluebird, or using the
new Promise support in browsers and Node.js. But, do you know how these work,
and when you should use them?

In this talk we will review the benefits, pitfalls, and ways to implement
concurrent JavaScript code in Node.js and the browser. We’ll look at the support
for async/await, how this differs from callbacks and asynchronous libraries,
and take a brief look at how these have been implemented to gain a better
understanding of what’s going on under the hood.

At the end of this talk you will be able to make more informed decisions about
the use of synchronous API methods such as readFileSync, choosing to listen to
error events, and why wrapping function calls in try..catch may or
may not be useful.

David Wood

Dave is a Contract Software Developer currently working at
nearForm. Specialising in Node.js, Dave is
working hard to deliver ambitious and complicated systems in JavaScript.
Being a former Esendex Developer, he has
strong opinions on TDD, DDD and clean code.

In 2016 Dave helped write Hackbot
and the Hack24-API for use at
various hack events, and spends his free time dabbling in many unfinished
projects. He is an advocate for TypeScript, prefers to avoid .NET (at last),
and recently converted to veganism to help save the world from self
destruction.

You will need Android studio or xcode installed to get the simulators up and
running.

Chris Kemp

Chris is one of the Organisers at NottsJS with many years of experience in IT
across a large number of sectors. He currently works as a Software Contractor
developing software for Fire & Rescue Services.

Thursday, July 13, 2017

Artificial Intelligence is the latest hotness. Machine Learning sits behind
artificial intelligence and on the surface it may seem like a deeply technical,
scientific topic. We are here to tell you that it is more accessible than you
think. We’ll look at some of the basics around the Azure Machine Learning
service. We’ll also look some of the Microsoft Cognitive Services APIs which
make it very easy to implement artificial intelligence ‘smarts’ into your
application with simple, standard REST calls via any programming language or
platform, including JavaScript.

Martin Kearn

Martin is an evangelist at Microsoft. He is into Web, Cognitive, Office,
Windows and Azure, and is based near Birmingham, UK

Tuesday, May 9, 2017

Join us with our guest speaker Manthan Dave with his talk: “Up and
running with chat bots: A journey from being a noob to being awesome“

The chat bot revolution is upon us and every developer wants to build one. This
workshop will take them on an epic journey starting from basics and writing a
simple chat bot, all the way to learning advanced concepts.

Ever wondered what goes behind a good chat bot? Do you want to build one? Well
this workshop is for you!

Complexity can be diffused as soon as you peek behind the curtain. A chat bot,
like a website might look complex from the outside, but the reality is
different.

This workshop will be divided into three sections. The first section will cover
the basic anatomy of a chat bot. Next, we’ll work together to build a chat
bot. We’ll start simple with a chat bot that’ll tell us knock knock and chuck
norris jokes. Towards the end of the workshop, we’ll go over some advanced
concepts that can help us scale our chat bot to have more features.

So come! Join us on an awesome journey to talkify our bots!

Manthan Dave

Manthan Dave like drones, robots and tech in general. He make awesome
things. Bit by bit.

Tuesday, April 11, 2017

Bring your laptops with a copy of Firefox
Nightly installed as we
will hack away at building your own extensions using bleeding edge features.

Firefox Containers tabs are an experimental platform feature for tab management
and isolating browsing to solve security and privacy issues.

With the recent launch of containers to
test pilot, I’m going to
walk through how they are built. Web Extensions are the new cross browser way
of adding features to the browser built entirely from JavaScript and other web
technologies. New web extension features were added to Firefox for building our
containers experiment that you can use today.

I will cover the basics of building extensions so we can have half the evening
on hacking and making extensions.

Jonathan Kingston

Tuesday, March 14, 2017

React is currently my favourite JavaScript framework, and I used
it recently to create the Notts Dev Workshop website. It led me
to the realisation that NottsJS really should be showcasing
JavaScript based web development. (I know! Really?!)

Most people don’t get to try a new technology in their day-to-day
job, so they do it in their spare time. These people then don’t
get to apply what they’ve learnt to a real-world problem.

So that’s exactly what I you will be doing. My
plan is to use slave labour to enable you to
build our website.

I will be acting as your customer and will be signing off your
final work, so expect me to try to give you a live example of
what it means to use this technology in a real setting.

So please join us in building a real-world react website.

Chris Kemp

Chris is one of the organisers at NottsJS and finds himself without any better
offers on Valentine’s day.

Tuesday, January 10, 2017

Elm is a domain-specific, purely functional programming
language used for declaratively creating client-side web apps which compile to
JavaScript.

In this talk you’ll be shown The Elm Architecture, a nestable pattern for
building applications, and Elm’s full type inference system that helps prevent
users from running into errors.

We’ll look at how Elm handles HTTP requests and websockets, how it handles
uncertainty, the use of partial function application for reusable views,
interaction with JS libraries, and how data immutability gives you undo/redo for
only a few lines of code.

Will White

Will read about Elm in late 2015, and has been using it for the last six
months or so. Before then he was using React/Redux and vanilla JS.

Will has been working on a donations application that will build wealth
redistribution into everyday transactions. As far as he knows,
Helpfreely have made the most progress in the
donate-while-you-shop space. Will hopes to be working with them soon.

Tuesday, November 8, 2016

“You’re using ? That’s so 2015. You need to use !”- Javascript Developers

With something that is approaching attention deficit disorder there’s new
JavaScript frameworks emerging weekly. Even the godfather of modern JS
development, jQuery, has been knocked from its perch and is considered passé.

So what do we do now? How do we leverage the good tech, while avoiding the
cargo cults?

This month we’re going for something completely new. Enter The Cool Wall. A
segment that will prove so popular that Jeremy Clarkson will invent Time Travel
to steal it from us and make into a popular segment on Top Gear.

This month’s session will be a group discussion piece where we talk about the
state of modern JavaScript development and our place in this world.

Tuesday, October 11, 2016

Web apps can be pretty cool, but we could be making them even cooler. Browsers
are leveling up by adding functionality to enable a user experience akin to
using a native mobile application.

Enter the new buzz-phrase of the moment… Progressive Web Apps!

This talk aims to share knowledge gained from Dan’s time at FullStack
2016
conference, and the lessons learned from implementing the features into real web
applications. The goal is to provide more than just a high level overview; you
should be able to walk away confident that you can implement these features into
your own web apps straight away.

You’ll find out why you should care, what’s available, see a demo and see what
features are offered in browsers.

Dan Ian Shea

Professionally he concentrates on web apps and web services leveraging .NET
technologies. In his own time he likes to gain hipster dev cred by hacking
away with Node.js and Angular using an ancient Linux laptop. When the moment
strikes, he likes to build crappy robots and make even crappier games.

Tuesday, September 13, 2016

In today’s online world, user experience is key. Users expect slick interfaces
that are intuitive, informative and engaging. More and more, building apps that
update the user in Realtime are becoming an essential part of this experience
- and we can see this every day with things like Google Docs, Facebook
Notifications, Slack and BBC Live Text.

RethinkDB is a fully featured, opensource, NoSQL database designed to make
developing for the Realtime Web easy. We’ll talk about changefeeds, clustering
and how combining with Node.js can help you avoid some of the pitfalls of
building rich, engaging, Realtime Apps to scale and across multiple platforms.

By the end of this talk you’ll be ready to go back and create your first
Realtime App with RethinkDB and Node.js.

Matt Collins

Before joining IBM Cloud Data Services Matt was the Head of the Development
team at Web.com UK, overseeing the development of a range of web services with
PHP, Node.JS, Cloudant, Amazon Redshift and Redis. Most of his experience is
in creating whitelabel search, presence and CRM products designed to be used
at scale by third parties.

Matt has a particular interest in anything to do with realtime apps and
football - currently looking for an excuse to combine the two!

We are committed to creating a safe and diverse environment and ask all our attendees to adhere to the Code of Conduct.

We will never share or sell your personal information.

Help Out

If you fancy helping out with getting this group off the ground, please feel free to drop us a mail - all help would be gratefully received!

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Suggest a Talk

If you'd like to submit a proposal for a talk, or have any suggestions for topics you'd like to see,
please add a ticket over at github.com/nottsjs/speakers.

NottsJS is a meetup for developers and anyone else interested in development. We meet every 2nd Tuesday of the
month to talk about Node, JavaScript and Full Stack development in the Nottingham area.